


Not the Destination

by KiaraSayre



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Armchair Therapy, Artist Steve Rogers, Chicago Institute of Art, Demisexual Steve Rogers, Demisexuality, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Karaoke, M/M, Museums, Musicals, Road Trips, Steve Rogers Has Issues, Sushi, The Grand Canyon, Therapy, Yoga
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-09
Updated: 2014-09-09
Packaged: 2018-02-16 19:22:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2281650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KiaraSayre/pseuds/KiaraSayre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before they leave New York, Tony Stark (<i>Tony Stark</i>, Jesus, Sam's not over it, never ever over it) hands him an AmEx Black and says, "Don't let Cap spend it all on egg creams and quarters for the jukebox."</p><p>"That is exactly what I'm gonna do," Sam says.  "Egg creams and jukeboxes, nonstop.  That's how we roll."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not the Destination

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Desdemon for giving it a quick lookover and thereby reminding me of its existence! Other than quick references to canon-typical violence, this one doesn't even have any warnings, making it possibly the opposite of some other stories I've written.

Sam's been seeing a therapist basically since he got back from the war. Dr. Samson was fairly new to the VA when Sam was first a recipient of their services, and they work in different enough departments that Sam doesn't feel weird still seeing him. And really, Sam doesn't need therapy anymore, not like he did when he came back, and he's talked about it enough with the Doc to know that he agrees, but it's covered by his insurance and Sam's a big believer in the talking cure.

"I'm going away for a while," Sam tells him at their first weekly meeting after - well, everything. "There's this friend of mine who's having some trouble with some stuff, and he's going on a road trip. We think a change of scenery will do him some good."

"Mmhmm," says Samson. "I presume you're talking about Captain America?"

There's a split second when Sam considers lying - not so much for security reasons as for Steve's privacy - but hey, this is therapy. "That already make it into the _Washington Post_?"

"No, and of course everything you say in our sessions is completely confidential," Samson says. "But I do watch the news, on occasion, and I can't imagine how many people know how to operate the wings like that, but I'd bet it's a small number."

"Fair enough," Sam says. "Yeah, I'm going on a roadtrip with Captain America."

"Planning on taking down any more government agencies while you're on the road?" Samson asks. "I hear the Chicago Fed is nice this time of year."

"Ha, ha," Sam says, but his smile is genuine. "Nah, we're going after a friend of Steve's. HYDRA had him for - for a long time, and now he's off the grid."

"That sounds potentially dangerous," Samson says, and Sam shrugs.

"I'm used to battlefields."

"So you expect actual combat, then?"

"Maybe," Sam allows. "But I mean - there's the front line and then there's the home front, and sometimes they don't feel all that different, you know? I chose to stay at the VA. Every last person in one of my groups is still fighting something, fighting _for_ something. That's a battlefield, too."

"So what will you be fighting _for_ on this road trip, then?"

Sam thinks about it for a moment. "The guy we're going after - he was Steve's best friend, and Steve thought he was dead. But instead he was just - lost. _Real_ lost, but still. And now Steve's got a chance to get him back, and if I can help him…" Sam shakes his head. "I've been on the other side of that. Anything I can do to help someone come through that, I gotta do it."

Samson nods, slowly. "What I'm hearing you say," he says, "is that you see parallels between Captain America's situation now and yourself when Riley died. Is it possible that you're helping Captain America because it would be - in a way - saving Riley?"

"Riley's gone, and I know nothing I do will change that," Sam says, leaning back in his chair, one of the blocky, dormitory-grade, VA-issued monstrosities. "It's not - it's about Riley as much as I still remember him, and I don't want anyone else to lose someone like I lost Riley."

Samson nods again. "And you're willing to put yourself in danger just for that? Based on what you've said, I'm a little worried about you taking care of yourself."

"I get that," Sam says. "I do. But it's also more than that, which is that it does look like this friend of Steve's can be saved. I didn't think so, but - he might not be as far gone as I thought. And when I say HYDRA had him, I mean serious shit, here."

"I believe it," Samson says.

"And Steve - it's hard to believe, but even Captain America has no idea how to handle himself right now. He's no good at being a veteran, even though he's damn good at being a soldier. But his friend's been a soldier for too long, and they're both going to need help learning how _not_ to be on a battlefield, you know?"

"And you think you're the person to help them do that? When you said that you've deliberately placed yourself on battlefields, metaphorical and literal, ever since you got back?"

Sam grins. "It sounds a little bit like the blind leading the blind, when you put it like that."

"Well, that _is_ what I was getting at."

"I think Steve might actually listen to me," Sam says. "And no offense, but I _don't_ think he'd listen to you. Or very many people at all, for that matter. Turns out he's a bit of a rebel. If he'll let me in and I can help, then I've got to."

"I do have another question, and if you don't feel comfortable discussing it right now then I understand," Samson says. "Are you attracted to him?"

"To Captain America?" Sam says. "Have you _seen_ the man? Of course I'm attracted to him. But I'm not going with him to try to get in his pants, if that's what you're asking, or because I have a crush. I'm perfectly capable of handling being attracted to someone like an adult, thank you very much."

Samson shrugs, in what's very much an 'I had to ask' gesture. "So when will you be back?"

Sam thinks for a minute, and then says, "I guess we'll find out."

 

Due to various delays ranging from having to get gas to an emergency call from Maria Hill that ends up being a false alarm, they get on the road right in time to hit evening rush hour. On a Friday.

"Hopefully this road trip will end a little better than the last time we took a drive together," Steve says, closing the passenger's-side door and buckling his seatbelt.

Sam shakes his head, weighing the perfect straight-line against the desire to point out that Steve just completely and utterly jinxed it. The straight-line wins. "Yeah, rush hour in DC's terrible, man."

Steve gives him that wry look of his. "I was referring to the violent explosions."

"If you think those aren't the same thing, you clearly haven't had to drive in rush hour before," says Sam. "We're about to hit it again. And all that on the bridge doesn't hold a candle to the Orange Line during intern season."

It takes them two and a half hours to get to Baltimore, due to a combination of early beach traffic up to Delaware, typical Friday going-out-of-town traffic, and an accident on 95 that brings them to a standstill for - and Sam checks - thirty-seven minutes. Between that and having left at the worst possible time, by the time they're seeing signs for Wilmington, Sam's beginning to think that they'll get there faster if they stop for the night and leave at the ass-crack of dawn, and says so.

Steve raises his eyebrows with the exact body language that makes Sam think he's about to get a half-ironic 'back in my day...' speech about walking barefoot uphill both ways through the Alps to punch Hitler in the face, but instead Steve just shrugs. "Okay."

They get dinner at some anonymous restaurant in Wilmington, a city which leaves almost no impression whatsoever, and find a motel. 

The guy working the front desk looks at them and, with a barely-suppressed eyebrow-raise of his own, says, "Are you two together or separate?"

"Together," Steve says absently, his attention on pulling out his wallet.

Sam clarifies quickly, "Two beds, though," and the guy just nods and processes the room.

"Oh," Steve says, and, based on the look on his face, does some processing of his own.

"You know, you could," Sam says when they're back up to the room. "I mean, if you wanted to get two rooms, it's fine. If you, you know. Want some privacy."

Steve just shakes his head, half a smile on his face. "I grew up sharing my apartment with my family, and then with Bucky, and then we were in the field with the Commandos and privacy wasn't a word any of us knew. I honestly think I'm more comfortable - or - " He glances over at Sam quickly, then takes his eyes back to his suitcase. "Unless - if you wanted separate rooms, that's fine. I'd be fine with that."

"No," Sam says. "No, that's not - I mean, if you wanted to...blow off some steam. Maybe go to a bar, meet someone, have a little conversation, and then, you know, bring them back to the hotel."

"Well, that's very thoughtful," Steve says in that desert-dry way of his. "I won't judge if you want to do that, but that's not really for me."

Sam grins. "Yeah? Is Captain America keeping his V-card unpunched until marriage?"

"What? No," Steve says, "that's not it, I just - I've never really understood the appeal."

"Of sex?"

"Of...anonymous sex, I guess. I'm not - I don't care one way or the other about what you or anyone else does, and God knows the other Commandos every time we got to a friendly town - well. It's just not for me, I guess."

Sam glances back towards Steve, whose eyes are resolutely on his suitcase. "Uh-huh," Sam says. "So, what, you want it to mean something? That it?"

Steve makes a half-wincing face that eloquently conveys _not quite_ and _how can I end this conversation as quickly as possible_ at the same time.

"We don't have to talk about it," Sam says quickly. "I'm just trying to get a sense of what you mean, exactly. Something like this, seems like there could be some intergenerational context or something that - "

"No, it's not a generational thing," Steve says ruefully. "It was just as odd back then."

"I don't think it's _odd_ ," Sam says. "I mean, hey, the only one who should be saying how much sex you should be having and with whom is you, you know?"

Steve is unmistakably blushing now, his eyes flickering from Sam to his suitcase to anywhere in the room that _isn't_ Sam. "I just," Steve says. "I don't really see why you'd want to have sex with someone you don't even know. Or, I mean, it's fine if someone else does, but I just - don't."

"You've never met someone or seen someone and thought, _damn_ , I'd...very much like to have sex with that person?" says Sam, quickly swapping in a more straightforward phrase for the wide variety of modern alternatives. He and Steve may be buddies, but they're not such buddies that Sam wouldn't be completely weirded out teaching him the fine distinctions between "hit that," "tap that," and "climb that like a tree."

"Well, how do you know you're attracted to them if you don't know them?" Steve says.

Sam contemplates this for a moment. "Have you ever just been attracted to someone? Physically?"

Steve shrugs, an awkward movement while his arms are still elbow-deep in folded old-man-pants. "Not without getting to know them first. I mean, I can tell when someone's attractive or beautiful or - but that's not quite the same."

"No, I guess not," Sam says.

"And I like it all just fine, don't get me wrong," Steve continues. "It's not that nothing...happens, but I just - I'd prefer to do it with someone I already know. Already care about."

Sam nods. "Fair enough."

"But if _you_ want to, then by all means, don't let me stop you," Steve says. "We can get separate rooms."

"Nah," Sam says. "I've never been a one-night-stand man, either."

"Oh?"

"Before I shipped out, I was more of a serial monogamist," Sam says. "End one serious relationship, go straight into another. But I didn't want to do long-distance - didn't want to do that to someone. And once I got over there, seemed like there were some more pressing matters, y'know?"

"I think I can guess what that's like," Steve says.

"And since I got back…" Sam shrugs. "I spent a lot of time sorting out my own stuff, and one of the things I realized is that I probably didn't want to date a civilian. Too much baggage to just dump on someone unsuspecting. But most of the other vets I met were through group, and no way would I date someone in my group. Too much of a power differential, and things get so intense - it's like how therapists aren't supposed to date their patients."

"Makes sense," Steve says.

"What about you, are you...looking?" Sam asks.

Steve rolls his eyes towards the ceiling. "Natasha keeps - kept - trying to set me up. Those dates didn't tend to work out. And now…" He pauses for a moment, one thumb absently running over the zipper of the suitcase. "I don't think I can think about it just now. I've been awake for three years while HYDRA had Bucky. I can't waste any more time."

"You realize that taking care of yourself isn't a waste of time, though, right?" Sam says. "Like, just basic, making-sure-you-don't-lose-it stuff?"

"I know," Steve says, but it sounds noncommittal as hell to Sam. 

"Okay, good," Sam says. "So how about this, then - for every city we go to trying to track down a HYDRA lead, you gotta try at least one thing to see if it makes you happy."

Steve glances over at him. "What?"

"You said a while back that you didn't know what made you happy," Sam says. "So let's find out. Every city, just try something new. Just one thing. It can be, I don't know, going to a museum or going out dancing or, hell, trying a new dessert that you've never had before. So long as it's new and it might make you happy."

"Doesn't that seem a little…" Steve wrinkles up his whole face in what isn't quite a wince.

"If it works, who cares?" Sam says, and Steve doesn't have a counterargument to _that_.

 

They finally make it to New York City, in case any of Barnes's memories pulled him back to the city where he grew up. Privately, Sam has another reason - New York has a lot of high-profile targets if Barnes is still compromised and intends to start shit. On top of that, Sam would be surprised as hell if SHIELD didn't operate heavily there after the Chitauri invasion, and where SHIELD went, HYDRA went.

He doesn't mention it to Steve, though. Sam's at the wheel when they cross the George Washington Bridge into the city, after finally cajoling Steve into trading off at a rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike, and he turns to Steve and says, "Gotta do one thing to make you happy, remember?"

Steve glances at him absently, and then Sam's words sink in and he groans. "You're really going to hold me to that?" he says.

"Damn right," Sam says. "That's the great thing about New York - there's so much to do that you could try. And no, lapping me twenty times in Central Park doesn't count. Doing the same thing in a new location isn't doing a new thing."

He glances away from the road - which is maybe not such a great idea, since they _of course_ hit stop-and-go traffic on the bridge - to look at Steve, who's frowning heavily.

"What?" Sam prompts.

"No, I just - " Steve says, and cuts himself off with an uneven frown. "I don't really want to deal with something...big, you know? Not right now. I guess I'm in the mood for something familiar, and if doing the same thing in a new place doesn't count, then doing the same thing in an old place doesn't count either. That rules out going back to my old neighborhood."

Sam resettles his fingers on the steering wheel. "Yeah," he says quietly. "I guess it does. And - do you really think it would make you happy?"

Steve tilts his head towards Sam, conceding the point. "The last time I was here, I was a little distracted by that whole alien invasion," he says. "I'm not sure I know what there is to _do_ in New York anymore."

"Well," says Sam slowly, "you could always ask someone who does."

Steve raises his eyebrows. "You come to New York a lot?"

"I'm not talking about me," Sam says. "You know Tony Stark, right?"

Which is how they end up with Tony Stark insisting that they crash at his place, which turns out to mean going out to an insanely expensive bar with Stark, Pepper Potts, and Colonel James Rhodes. Sam doesn't remember much after that, but Stark emails him a YouTube video the next morning of him and Rhodes doing karaoke to "Tubthumping" more loudly than Sam would've thought was possible while slurring that badly, while Steve laughs so hard that he cries in the corner of the shot.

It's the first time Sam's seen Steve laugh like that. It's almost worth the horrendous hangover.

(No, it's not. It's a really bad hangover and Sam kind of wants to die.)

Before they leave New York, Tony Stark ( _Tony Stark_ , Jesus, Sam's not over it, never ever over it) hands him an AmEx Black and says, "Don't let Cap spend it all on egg creams and quarters for the jukebox."

"That is exactly what I'm gonna do," Sam says, partly because he recognizes this kind of bravado and knows how to deal with it - and partly because he's starting to feel like part of an actual team, and being part of a team means a certain amount of being a tool to your teammates. It's like that movie his niece insists on watching about five times a day: ohana means fucking with people you like. "Egg creams and jukeboxes, nonstop. That's how we roll."

"Get out of here, flyboy," Stark says.

"You were right," Steve says when they're back in the car and Sam has his darkest pair of sunglasses on - the ones he usually wears with the suit, strapped across his face. The sun is still brighter than it has any goddamn right to be. "That _was_ fun. It may even have made me happy."

Sam can't figure out how the hell Steve can manage to sound so innocent and so smug at the same time.

 

It becomes kind of a game after that - a way to pass the time in the long hours in the car: Sam throws around suggestions and Steve commentates, occasionally with assistance from Wikipedia pulls up on his smartphone.

"You'd probably like _Wicked_ ," says Sam. "It's a musical based on _The Wizard of Oz_."

Steve frowns. "That's already a musical. They took a musical and made it into another musical?"

"Well, yeah, but it's from the Wicked Witch of the West's perspective," says Sam, and tries to remember anything else about it. He'd seen the cast perform that one song everyone knows on The Late Show, once, and it had seemed...passionate. The kind of belt-it-out, empowering song that'd probably be right up Steve's alley. And besides, at this point, something where the villain's not the villain might be good for Steve.

And Sam kind of likes the whole flying motif, to be honest.

"Was that the green one?" Steve says.

"Yup," Sam says, and when he looks over, Steve's shaking his head.

So Sam puts that AmEx Black to use, figures out when they're likely to overlap with the touring production, and gets them tickets for when they pass through Boston. They spend the intermission talking about stage effects and how far live theater's come (Steve goes off on a tangent about how they had air conditioning for _years_ before he went into the ice and maybe it's more popular now but if Nat makes a joke about him being old _one more time_ \- ), and then the second act happens and Sam realizes that he fucked up, he fucked up so bad.

The show should come with a goddamn warning: Not Safe For Anyone Who Has Ever Felt Friendship Or Something Like It; In Case Of Emergency, Cry.

Steve puts his baseball cap on as soon as they get out of the theater and Sam pretends not to notice the tight, shiny skin below his eyes or the damp quality of his breathing. Steve does the same, because damn if Sam didn't spend the whole last two songs thinking about Riley and what he would've said if he'd known they were going out on their last mission together, or all the other guys in his unit who didn't make it back, or even the kids he grew up with in Harlem that he couldn't make himself call up when he got back Stateside because he didn't want to acknowledge that things were different now.

They go to an indie coffee shop, get mugs of something warm, and just sit for a while, quiet and contemplative. Then Sam says, "You know, Glinda totally reminds me of you," and Steve looks equal parts touched and offended and it's totally worth it.

Sam wakes up the next morning with a sketch next to his pillow of Glinda, poofy-frilly dress and all, wearing Cap's cowl and holding the shield. Sam wants to get it framed.

 

After the Boston tip leads to nothing much, they end up meandering south and west, hopping from one HYDRA hot-spot to another. There's no sign of Barnes, not so much as a former HYDRA agent's corpse, and Sam starts to wonder if Barnes made it off the Helicarrier at all. Steve's pretty insistent that he did, and the updates they get from Fury, intermittent though they are, are pretty adamant that any remains of the former Sergeant would be immediately identifiable due to some of the more extreme modifications done to him by HYDRA.

They stop at Niagara Falls on the way to one of Fury's tip-offs, this one leading them to Chicago, because why not? Their route takes them through Buffalo anyway, and it's not that far out of the way at all.

"Ever been here before?" Sam asks, watching the rush of water. There must be a plaque or something somewhere that says how much water passes through the Falls every day, but even looking at it is - intimidating, somehow. Putting a number on it might not help with that.

"Yeah, actually," Steve says, jamming his hands in his pockets. His wardrobe these days is a mix of modern jeans and old-fashioned trousers, whatever he could salvage from his apartment after SHIELD - or rather, HYDRA - ransacked it while he was on the run. "USO tour."

"Huh," Sam says.

"You?"

"Nope. This is a first. I grew up in New York City, though," Sam says. "Can't remember if I ever told you that. Maybe I did, when Stark took us out, after about the tenth Jaeger bomb." He looks sideways at Steve, but Steve's smile at the memory is forced. Not a time for levity, then. "Riley, though, he was from Arizona. Always wanted to see the Statue of Liberty. I told him it wasn't all it was cracked up to be, but he could stay with my family in Harlem if he was really sure. First time I saw it on the skyline after he died - I just got so _angry_ at it. I knew it was stupid, but I just hated that damn statue for being there when Riley couldn't see it."

Steve nods, and after a moment asks, "What kind of family? In Harlem, I mean."

"Mother, brother, and a sister. And a niece. Dad died when I was a kid."

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah. Me, too. What about you? I mean - "

Steve shakes his head, looking out at the white, frothing mass of water. "After my mom died, I basically just had Bucky."

This, Sam thinks, is the problem with all these superhero shenanigans: he's torn between the impulse to point out that if Barnes pulled Steve out of the Potomac like Steve insists he did, then Steve probably still _does_ have Bucky, at least a little bit, and the impulse to urge Steve to start moving on from the homicidal brainwashed assassin that Barnes has obviously become.

Steve turns back to Sam and smiles thinly. "Want me to take the wheel this time?"

 

Chicago had a significant HYDRA presence, and, according to Fury, was going to be the staging area for HYDRA's full-on incursion into Canada after Project Insight went live. HYDRA, it seems, had no intention of only ruling from the skies, at least when it came to America's northerly neighbor. Sam keeps his maple syrup and hockey jokes to himself. He doesn't know how old the references are, anyway.

"So I looked online," Steve says as they draw closer to the city. Sam makes an encouraging noise, only ten minutes on the other side of a three-hour nap and still a little muzzy-headed. "For my thing that makes me happy - have you ever been to the Art Institute?"

"I've never been to Chicago, actually," Sam says, and sits himself up a bit straighter in the passenger's seat, trying to remember his history. And wake up, for that matter. "That's right, you went to art school, didn't you?"

Steve winces. "They put that in the history books?"

"And in the Smithsonian exhibit," Sam says, grinning. Steve opens his mouth, and Sam says, "The old one, before New York. American History, not Air and Space. Obviously when you turned out to be alive and killing aliens, they had to do some updating." He looks back out his window and adds contemplatively, "God knows why they put it in Air and Space, though."

Steve clears his throat, a little awkwardly. "For the IMAX screen. There were some movies...they're not accurate. Don't see them."

Sam resolves to see them as soon as physically possible.

They go to the Art Institute, and Steve fills in all kinds of art history and art theory tidbits about the paintings. He ends up lingering in front of a rendering of the New York City skyline in gentle blues and yellows, like the last rays of sunset rolling over the city in front of a deepening-blue sky. The informational plaque says that the painting was done in 1913, and it occurs to Sam that this must be the skyline that Steve thinks of when he thinks of New York.

"Is this what you used to see?" Sam asks, and Steve's lips quirk up.

"I wasn't alive when this was painted," he says. "I'm not _that_ old."

"Eh, once you're a nonagenarian, I figure another decade here or there is just pocket change," Sam says, shrugging. 

The museum's effect on Steve is obvious. Steve doesn't look happy, or even personable or approachable like he did when he came to the VA, but he stands up a bit straighter, as though he's more aware of the core of himself. It's most reminiscent, to be honest, of Steve during their conversation on top of the dam: then, it was Steve anchoring himself in the certainty that he'd save Barnes. Now, it's - Sam doesn't even know.

"So," Sam says, as Steve lingers in front of a Georgia O'Keeffe painting that's full of color and abstract shapes that nevertheless remind Sam of a vagina, "what is it about impressionism that keeps making you pause?"

"American modernism," Steve corrects immediately and absently, his eyes still on the painting. Then he blinks and looks at Sam. "What do you mean?"

"You keep stopping in front of the, sorry, _American modernist_ paintings," Sam says, shrugging. "Lots of abstraction, as opposed to realism - in the sense of it looking directly real. I was just wondering why."

"Huh," Steve says, glancing back at the painting. "I didn't even notice."

Sam peers over at the plaque. "Is it because of the time period? Everything remind you of back then?"

"No," Steve says slowly. "Although obviously, yes, this is a lot of what was being produced when I was going through art school, but that's not…" One corner of his mouth curls up in a thoughtful frown. "I guess...in a painting like this, you're not seeing what the artist saw - you're seeing their best representation of what they experienced. Their _vision_ almost, beyond just a specific sight. That kind of connection is powerful."

Sam nods. "I get that."

Steve glances over again. "Thanks for letting me drag you to a museum."

Sam grimaces. "Thanks for letting me keep as much dignity as possible while Tony Stark was feeding me shots back in New York. I'm getting off easy with a museum, man."

 

Whatever peace and center Steve found at the museum doesn't last long. They find a document in an abandoned HYDRA safehouse that references some operations conducted by HYDRA's California branch up in the Arctic, dated a few years before Steve was found and recovered. The semi-permanent frown returns, and Steve snaps the file shut.

"Guess we're going to California," he says. Sam doesn't argue.

It's a rough fourteen-hour push to Denver, which is the only place that's far enough that Steve can consider the day well-spent without driving the thirty-five hours straight through to San Francisco. Sam spends seven of the fourteen hours trying to think of a way to keep Steve from doing the next twenty-one hours straight, and the other seven contemplating how to try to get Steve to try skiing for his one new thing in Denver.

The former ends up being unnecessary, since about forty-five minutes before they end up finding a hotel Steve says, "Can we stop by the Grand Canyon?"

Sam blinks - he's in the driver's seat at the moment and there's an asshole directly in front of him who has either tried to change lanes four times without using his turn signal or is maintaining the shittiest lane position Sam has ever seen, and since the driver also happens to have Virginia plates both are equally likely - and then processes the request. "Sure," he says, trying not to sound too enthusiastic about Steve volunteering not only something new, but an actual detour. "Yeah, whatever you want, man."

He still badgers Steve into trying something new in Denver. It ends up being sushi in the hotel restaurant, which isn't the worst sushi Sam's ever had but clearly isn't good enough to sell Steve on the idea of raw fish. Sam puts a calendar reminder in his phone for two days from now to get Steve to try _good_ sushi in California - the fourteen-hour drive has left him road-dazed and a little brain-dead, and he knows better than to assume he'll just remember.

 

They get to the Grand Canyon just as the sun is beginning to set, and fight their way past the tourists - the other tourists, rather; Sam is beginning to realize how much of the DC habit of viewing tourists as dumb, oblivious, and borderline subhuman he picked up, now that he is one himself - to get to the best lookout spot. Which is frankly one of many. Sam's never been to the Grand Canyon before either, and the view is pretty spectacular in the sunset: miles of jagged depth spreading out to the horizon, layered with shadows and striations of rock.

Steve's mouth pulls in, just a little bit, and Sam tries not to narrow his eyes too obviously. They stand there in silence for about five minutes before Steve finally breaks.

"Bucky always wanted to see the Grand Canyon," he says.

It's - disorienting, first of all, to assign to Barnes any desire other than murder. And seeing the Grand Canyon is...maybe it was different back then, before airports and all that, but in Sam's mind it's kids who want to see the Grand Canyon. But Barnes must've been a kid once, and with Steve no less, licking melted ice cream from his fingers and scraping up his knees and laughing - actually laughing.

It's damn hard sometimes to remember that Steve didn't just _lose_ his life from 1945, but that at one point it was something that he actually _had_ ; that to him, each moment of it was lived and inhabited and fully experienced on its own before it became part of the nebulous and poorly-documented past, locked up in the Smithsonian.

And for that matter, so did Barnes.

"He still can, man," Sam says, because he can't think of anything else to say. Steve only nods, but he doesn't square his shoulders to go into Captain America Battles Against Feelings Mode, so Sam counts it as a win. "Did you really think this would make you happy?"

Steve ghosts a smile, fleeting and not particularly happy. He's not hiding it as much anymore, Sam notices. Either the wounds are closer to the surface now, reopened by Barnes's reappearance, or maybe Steve's just more okay with showing them. "I thought it might...I don't know. Provide some closure, I guess."

"Mmm," says Sam, and shakes his head. "Closure's even worse than Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. That moment where everything suddenly goes from terrible to okay because you did the one thing that gives you _closure_? Doesn't exist. Trust me, you can go for years trying to find it, but all you're doing is opening up more stuff."

"Is that the idea?" Steve asks, squinting against the sunset to meet Sam's eyes. "Open up enough stuff, and you won't worry about the fact that it's all open?"

"Now you're just being ridiculous and pushing the metaphor too far," Sam says, and gets a genuine smile out of Steve for it.

 

Steve mentions it offhand, as they're passing through a whole lot of nowhere on the way to San Francisco, that a friend invited him to dinner and he asked if Sam could come along; Jim said yes, so would Sam like to join them?

It doesn't sink in until they're actually there that 'Jim' meant 'Jim Morita, famous Howling Commando and former Senator for California.'

But it does, and Sam shakes Jim Morita's hand while wondering if it would be rude to ask for an autograph.

"So now that they actually have commercial airplanes, you still decided to drive all the way across the country?" Senator Morita says to Steve, who shrugs modestly.

"Well, it seemed like a nice change, to be driving a car that wasn't stolen from the Nazis."

Morita smiles in acknowledgement of the joke, and takes them to an Italian restaurant that Morita swears is the most authentic Northern Italian food outside of Friuli-Venezia Giulia.

"Except," Morita assures Steve, with a wide grin, "a hell of a lot better than what _we_ ate there."

"Oh, good," says Steve, with a genuine glimmer of humor in his eye, "because if you tried to feed me Spam, I'd have to sock you in the jaw like old Adolph."

Dinner is - strange. It's about equal parts hilarious, soldier-humor Howling Commando anecdotes and solemn-eyed reminiscences. Morita knows about Bucky, at least, based on the hard-edged look in his eye every time Barnes's name comes up, and how he gives the toast "to Steve - for bringing the bastards down again, and to Bucky, for the same thing."

Eventually, several glasses of wine later, the subject...drifts somewhat.

"Yoga, these days," Morita says, gesturing to himself. "Every morning. Twelve sun salutations. It's why I'm still up and on my feet while Dum Dum has to be attended to by a small army of young women."

"Sounds like you might've gotten the short end of the stick on that one," Sam says, hiding a grin behind his wine glass.

"They're all his great-nieces," Morita says. "They think he's _adorable_. Wait, hang on - " He pulls out a smartphone and, after a few pokes and swipes, turns the screen towards Sam and Steve. The photo shows the illustrious and heavily decorated Howling Commando Dum Dum Dugan napping in an armchair, entirely covered in My Little Ponies: tucked into his arms, balanced precariously on top of his head, nestling against his neck where his head sags to one side. "I bribed Madison, the youngest, to friend me on Instagram."

Steve's smartphone is out in a snap. "Okay, Instagram, which one is that again?"

By the end of the night, Steve has an Instagram, Sam has an entirely new view of history, and Morita has somehow extracted a promise from the both of them to join him for his yoga practice the next morning.

Sam, having learned from certain events involving Tony Stark, Colonel Rhodes, and karaoke, has no hangover the next morning due to judicious restraint the night before. Steve has no hangover because he's Captain America, and even more, Sam is beginning to think, because he's _Steve_. Magical things like that happen to Steve.

Magical things like that apparently happen to Morita, too, because he's looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when he greets them at the door to his house.

"Not even squinting at the sunlight? You've sure learned how to hold your liquor better than you did in Austria," Steve says, shaking his head as he and Sam follow Morita through his house.

"Of course I have," Morita says dismissively. "I was in _politics_. You know what they say, practice makes perfect."

Morita has three yoga mats set out in his living room, and leads them through some warm-up exercises that are familiar to Sam, at least; he'd needed some light PT after the mission that took Riley, and his trainer had suggested yoga to keep some of his muscles from locking up.

Steve, though, for all of his near-gymnastic abilities, has so much muscle that even in the light twists he seems to be blocking himself out of the positions he's supposed to be in with his own flesh. Morita seems to catch on to this pretty quick, too, and - and this is when Sam _really_ starts to like and respect the guy - immediately shifts the focus of the session from strength to flexibility. Steve's spinal flexibility is just fine, but the sheer bulk of his body just doesn't provide the space that smaller - well, _normal_ \- people have in the poses.

Morita's face, Sam notices, stays turned carefully away from Steve, as though to hide a smile at Steve's increasingly obvious noises of frustration.

"That," Steve tells Sam, after they've made their polite - and in Steve's case, quite frustrated - goodbyes, "was awful."

"I don't know," Sam says, mostly because he's curious about how Steve'll react, "I kind of liked it. Nice and calming."

Steve just rolls his eyes, and looks frankly relieved later that afternoon when they get into a firefight in a HYDRA facility that was less abandoned than they'd been led to believe. They deal with it quickly and easily enough, though, and move on to going through the files that escaped Natasha's data-dump by virtue of being old and not digitized.

It's about three hours of dedicated skimming later when Sam finds it. He reads the whole file - it's not that long - and then stares at it for a long moment before the only right decision becomes clear.

He takes the paper copy over to Steve, who's looking through another box of hard copies. "Think I found something," he says.

Steve takes it, and his frown deepens as he reads. Sam can't blame him - he knows what it says. The theories, based on cryogenic experimentation on the Winter Soldier, that Captain America and the Red Skull could have somehow survived the crash in the Arctic; the discussions of HYDRA's decades-long search for the wreckage of Red Skull's ship; the debates over whether the behavior-modification and memory-wiping technologies used on the Winter Soldier could be used on Captain America as well.

Sam stays quiet as Steve's eyes travel down the page once, then once again for good measure. Then Steve carefully folds the paper in half, leaving it dangling between his thumb and forefinger.

"I guess that answers that," he says, his voice heavy.

"It's okay that it wasn't you," Sam says.

Steve doesn't bother to deny what he was thinking. "If they'd found me - if they'd known - maybe I could've - "

"Turned out just like him?" Sam says. "If HYDRA'd had you since the beginning, who knows what they could've done. Maybe they'd've woken you up and turned you into the same thing they turned him into. Maybe they'd've just shot you. At least this way, you managed to get through to him on the Helicarrier. And that's okay."

Steve crooks a lopsided smile, humorless. "Is that what I'm supposed to tell myself?"

"Nope," Sam says. "I know how this works. If you tell it to yourself, then you're selfish, and if someone else tells it to you then it's bullshit. It doesn't change the fact that it's true, though. It's okay that it wasn't you."

Steve nods slowly. "So - Riley...you think it's okay that it wasn't you?"

Sam's lips tighten in not-quite-a-smile, an acknowledgement of a hit. "Course not," he says. "But - if you stop thinking about it, get your mind on other stuff, eventually it stops being the first thing you think when you wake up. Not quite the same as 'okay,' but it's about as close as you can get."

Steve takes a deep breath, too unselfconscious to be a sigh. "Yeah," he says, noncommittal. Then he puts the paper down on top of the box of files in front of him. "This," he says, with the resignation of admission tinging his voice, "isn't getting us any closer to finding him."

Sam doesn't say anything. There's nothing to say that isn't pretty obvious.

"Maybe he doesn't want to be found," Steve says.

"Maybe," Sam says.

"I don't know where he'd go." Steve shakes his head. "Too many memories in New York, if he's got them. Too much in DC, whether he remembers it or not. He hated Indiana - no, even worse, he just never cared about it. He wouldn't go there." He's got a familiar thousand-yard-stare now. "Nowhere left for him." 

Sam gives him a long minute to process, and then says, as gently as he can, "So what's _our_ next move?"

Steve stands up with a grimace. "Our best lead was DC, I guess. Maybe we missed something. Things should've cooled down by now, anyway, after - everything."

"So we keep looking?"

"I'm not giving up," Steve says, and looks Sam right in the eye. "I can't. Doesn't matter what's okay and what's not. I'm not gonna stop looking for him until I've found him." The steely determination in his frown fades a little around the edges, and he adds, "If you want to - I mean, if we're going back to DC anyway - "

"I said 'we,' and I meant 'we,'" Sam says firmly. "You want to get rid of me, you're gonna have to use your words and say it."

Steve's expression softens into something fond, and almost awed. "Good," he says, and looks away to take the offending file off the box. "Just as long as we're on the same page."

 

The drive back towards DC is slower, more meandering. They take an hour for lunch here and there on the road, and Sam, after an internal debate about pushing Steve to at least drive through Las Vegas, suggests that they swing down and do a road trip of the South. Part of Sam's motivation, admittedly, is that another day of Midwestern highway scenery might well drive him completely out of his mind.

And every city they stop in, Steve tries at least one thing to make him happy. This time, though, it's all food - sopapillas in Phoenix, breakfast tacos in Austin, the requisite barbecue in Memphis - which makes Sam wonder a little if the whole yoga experience turned Steve off of really being adventurous.

And then they're back in DC on one of Sam's driving shifts, and Sam's pulling up to his house in Maryland. He's had enough long absences to know that he shouldn't be surprised that his house looks exactly the same as it did, but he still finds himself looking for the changes he feels in himself to be inscribed in his home.

What the hell would it be like, then, for Steve to go back to _his_ apartment?

"Take the couch," Sam says suddenly, shutting the car engine off and pulling the keys out. "Seriously, man, don't try to go back to your place. It'll be swarming with press even now, not to mention bullet holes."

Steve closes his eyes briefly. "Bucky might expect me to be there."

"Yeah, there's that too," Sam says. "We can check on it, or, hell, we can set up a 24/7 livefeed with a webcam. Fourteen year old girls can use Skype, we can figure it out. Just don't go back there alone. You're not imposing - if anything, you're gonna keep me from staying up at night wondering if you've managed to fling yourself off another ridiculous height."

Steve's mouth twitches. "Whatever Natasha told you, I don't actually do it that often."

"Natasha didn't tell me a thing, but I'm sure as hell gonna ask her now," Sam says. "The Helicarrier was one time too many, as far as I'm concerned."

"Even if I've got you to catch me?"

Sam inclines his head to indicate his house. "Sure. Just as long as you keep me around, or keep yourself around me. My couch feels more comfortable than my bed half the time anyway."

Steve finally nods. "All right. Thanks, Sam."

Sam nods, too, just a quick decisive motion, and gets out of the car to unpack his stuff. Steve meets him at the trunk.

Steve says, "You gonna keep making me try new things to make me happy?"

"Well, hopefully there's more than one thing out there that makes you happy," Sam says, and groans into a slight backbend. "And please don't tell me yoga made you happy. I didn't feel this sore when I was camping on rocks in the desert."

"No," Steve says, an odd edge - well, not quite edge, more like the opposite of an edge, a softening maybe? - to his voice. "No, it's not yoga."

Sam just looks at him, waiting for an explanation,, and then Steve honest-to-god licks his lips and the penny drops.

"Oh," Sam says, as basically all of his emotions explode at once.

"I'd like to - may I kiss you?" Steve asks, and Sam has to fight to keep his reaction to only a grin and not the full-on loony laughter that might hitch his breath at an inopportune time.

"Sure you may," he says, and leans into it.

It's not a terrible kiss. Thanks to the warning, they're both expecting it, so all of the relevant parts line up the way they're supposed to, and that immediately puts it ahead of an embarrassingly high proportion of Sam's first kisses with other people. Their lips touch, and there's just a smidgen of tongue, enough to push it past 'chaste' and firmly into 'hopefully leading to sex' territory, and again, it's not a _terrible_ kiss.

The thing is, it could be the worst fucking kiss in the world and Sam wouldn't give half a shit. _Steve_ is kissing _him_. He might just explode.

Based on the flush on Steve's face when they pull apart, he's not the only one.

Unfortunately, Sam's occasionally given to blurting out the first thing that comes to his mind, and so he says, "Thanks for not kiss-ambushing me. That doesn't always end well."

Steve grins outright at that. "Kiss-ambushing, huh? Is that what they call it these days?"

Sam raises his eyebrows. "What'd they call it in _those_ days, then? Or have you never been - "

"Oh, I've been," Steve says, and grimaces at the memory, although not without humor. "It's just always so - uncomfortable. I never know where to put my hands. Or my dignity."

"Dignity is overrated," Sam says, and when he leans in this time, Steve seems to figure out just fine where to put his hands.

**Author's Note:**

> The crack title for this one is, of course, "Egg Creams And Jukeboxes Nonstop." Or possibly "Sam and Steve's Excellent Roadtrip Montage."


End file.
